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The worldwide Wi-Fi customer premises equipment market including access points, routers and gateways shipments surpassed 139.1 million in 2013. “802.11ac access point adoption is starting to gain market share, representing 8% of the total consumer access point market in 2013,” says Jake Saunders, VP and practice director at ABI Research.

More device manufacturers started to ship 802.11ac products in 2013; the majority of them provide dual-band access to support existing 802.11n devices. “Although 802.11n devices hold the largest market share of the consumer Wi-Fi device shipments in 2013, 802.11n share of shipments is likely to start declining in 2014 as 802.11ac device adoption continues to grow. 802.11ac devices are expected to represent 45% of consumer Wi-Fi equipment shipments at the end of 2014,” adds Khin Sandi Lynn, industry analyst.

In the enterprise Wi-Fi market, 13.2 million access points were shipped in 2013; a 20% increment from 2012. 802.11ac standard access points accounted for 6% of enterprise-sized access points shipped in 2013. Cisco is the largest 802.11ac enterprise vendor, accounting for nearly 20% of total access points shipped in 2013.

D-Link topped the consumer Wi-Fi shipment market with a 12.7% market share in 3Q-2013, while TP-LINK dropped to second position with a slightly lower market share of 12.6%, and NETGEAR finished third at 12.4%. ZTE maintains its pole in the enterprise WLAN market with 33% market share, while Cisco stands in second position with 27%, followed by HP Networking with 8%. ABI Research forecasts that consumer and enterprise WLAN access point shipments will reach 171.5 million and 25 million respectively at the end of 2019.